State Historical Societies

One of the hardest hit areas in State budget cuts have been in newspaper and historical preservation services in State Libraries and Historical Societies. The cuts have been deep, and in many cases, these institutions have been left behind. We are pleased to be working with State Historical Societies across the country to help ease the burden of their filming backlog, and in turn are helping local libraries that are running out of shelf space with newspapers waiting for the film to arrive.

State Historical Societies

The Advantage Preservation team will work with the State Agency to customize a plan that will work in conjunction with current budget restraints and as a compliment to their current operations. Our goal is to partner closely with these institutions to continue to provide services and overcome limitations. Our current partnerships with several state level agencies actually have proven to offer MORE services at even LESS cost, allowing the reduced budgets to stretch even further and be applied to other areas of need. Our partnerships are not only complimentary to these agencies, but often increased service is seamless (Adding State Agency Specific Targets, Contacting Local Libraries for patron orders, etc.). We take great pride in these partnerships.

Our processes align to ANSI/AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) standards for archival microfilming, as well as specifications developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) & by the Library of Congress. This requires stringent adherence to our internal guidelines regarding the careful production & examination of all archival microfilm, in addition to well controlled storage & handling conditions

At Advantage Preservation, we understand that preservation is only 1/2 of the equation. Once your materials are protected on Microfilm, you need to consider accessibility to the valuable content. Advantage Preservation offers a user friendly digital solution to research your materials. The digital images can be provided on a searchable Hard Drive, DVD or we can format the images so they can be imported into your own searchable database. We offer full OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and Indexing of the images.

Combined, the Advantage Preservation team has been partnering with Libraries, Colleges, and Historical Societies to preserve their local history for over a century. We take great pride in converting local historical newspapers, record books, public records, and photos onto 35mm Silver Halide Microfilm to protect the valuable content from the ravages of time. Our Microfilm meets all ANSI/AIIM Standards for microfilm preservation and use archival-quality 35mm Silver Halide microfilm produced in our lab for true 500+ year preservation.

Digital Archive Hosting services from Advantage Preservation include designing and implementing cost-effective Web Based Document Management systems. We use these systems to create a web-accessible archive that leverages the latest online based document management technologies. Each application is customized to meet a client’s specific needs for an online web document hosting application.

Microfilm scanning plays a very important roll in any document preservation and access strategy, and Advantage Information Management Solutions are world leaders in this field – the result of over 30 years of working with micro graphic media. Our microfilm laboratory has converted hundreds of millions of images from microfilm, microfiche and aperture cards.

When properly manufactured, processed, and stored, polyester-based silver gelatin microfilm can be expected to last for as long as 500 years, but routine inspection of your non-silver film is highly recommended. As resources and time are limited commodities in most organizations, we have contract services for microfilm inspection available to help ensure the integrity of your film archive. Advantage Preservation’s associates and archival specialists will evaluate existing acetate based microfilm collections and provide detailed documentation.

Our document scanning services for micro-graphics are unmatched – the result of years of working with micro-graphic media. Our microfilm laboratory has converted hundreds of millions of images from microfilm, microfiche and aperture cards. At Advantage Information Management Solutions we offer many options for conversion of microfiche to digital image. Although similar to microfilm roll scanning, microfiche images must be individually scanned, and the conversion requires more time than roll film.

We utilize a number of different OCR conversion software packages for our scanning services and forms processing, each of which has its own strengths for certain types of documents. We don’t just scan paper documents, but we also convert materials that have been stored in microfilm and microfiche. Advanatage tailors data capture to the specific requirements of a project. We carefully analyze client needs and intensively test alternatives before recommending the conversion process.